Celebrity4 min(s) read
Christina Applegate had multiple sclerosis for six or seven years before she was diagnosed. The first sign was so small she barely noticed it.
Tingling in her toes.
That was it.
There was no collapse, no dramatic episode, just a faint sensation in her feet that came and went, and that she put down to tiredness, dehydration, or the weather.
By the time she realised what it actually was, she was being brought to set in a wheelchair.
Applegate first noticed something was off during the filming of Dead to Me's first season in 2019.
Her leg would buckle mid-scene. She would lose her balance without warning. Her tennis game fell apart.
"I really just put it off as being tired, or I'm dehydrated, or it's the weather," she told Robin Roberts on Good Morning America.
"Then nothing would happen for months, and I didn't pay attention."
That pattern, symptoms appearing and then disappearing for weeks or months, is one of the things that makes early MS so easy to dismiss. It feels like a bad day, not a disease. By the time the bad days become permanent, the condition has progressed significantly.
"My symptoms had started in the early part of 2021, and it was, like, literally just tingling on my toes," she said.
"And by the time we started shooting in the summer of that same year, I was being brought to set in a wheelchair. I couldn't walk that far. So I had to tell everybody, because I needed help."
It was not a doctor who told her to get checked - it was Selma Blair.
Blair, her co-star from the 2002 film The Sweetest Thing, was diagnosed with MS in 2018. When Applegate described what she was experiencing, Blair knew immediately.
"She said, 'You need to get checked for MS,'" Applegate recalled. "I said, 'Really? The odds? The two of us from the same movie? Come on, that doesn't happen to two people.'"
It did. Applegate was officially diagnosed in 2021. Production on Dead to Me's final season shut down for nearly five months while she began treatment.
"If not for her, it could have been way worse," she said.
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic autoimmune condition in which the body's immune system attacks myelin, the protective tissue surrounding nerves in the brain and spinal cord. When that coating is damaged, communication between the brain and the rest of the body breaks down.
Symptoms include numbness or tingling in the limbs, fatigue, muscle weakness, difficulty with coordination and balance, vision problems, slurred speech, and tremors.
Most people's symptoms first appear between the ages of 20 and 40. The disease is three times more common in women than in men.
The tingling that Applegate described is one of the earliest and most frequently overlooked signs.
Doctors say it often presents as a pins-and-needles sensation in the hands or feet that people dismiss as poor circulation, sitting in an awkward position, or sleeping on a limb.
When it comes and goes irregularly, as it did for Applegate, it is easy to convince yourself it is nothing.
The key signal that separates normal tingling from something worth investigating is persistence and recurrence.
If the sensation keeps coming back over weeks or months, particularly in the same areas, or is accompanied by any change in balance, coordination, vision, or fatigue, doctors say it should be raised at an appointment rather than explained away.
Applegate is 54.
She has described her life with MS as 'living in hell'.
She has said she lies in bed screaming from pain. She was hospitalised in August 2025 after a new flare-up left her unable to function.
She has shared devastating updates about the progression of the disease.
"I wish I had paid attention," she told the New York Times. "But who was I to know?"
That is the line that matters most.
She is not a doctor. She had no family history of MS. The tingling felt like nothing. She did what most people would do: she ignored it.
Seven years of symptoms. One conversation with a friend who recognised what she was describing. A diagnosis that changed everything.
"I'm flipping the bird all day long at this thing," she said. "And I'm angry. I'm really, really p***ed."
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